Collective Courage: A History of African American Cooperative Economic Thought and Practice

Economic cooperation and cooperatives have been a strategy for black liberation in the United States since people were pooling their resources to buy each other out of slavery and forming self-sustaining maroon colonies. Since then, coops have been used as an economic base for Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association, and more recently as a strategy for nonprofits and unions with a social justice mission. Jessica Gordon Nembhard chronicles that history in her book, Collective Courage: A History of African American Cooperative Economic Thought and Practice